The Power of Poppies on Veteran's Day

I live in England, where I am serving with a NATO headquarterswhich is mostly British. In particular, I live in a tiny village where quite a few houses have thatched roofs. This village is directly across the River Severn from the small, quaint, and impossibly historic town of Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire. It is about 7 miles from my headquarters.

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Village life in this corner of the "Cotswolds" region is well, exactly what every American would think life in England is but that is so rare in reality. The house I live in is older than the country I come from. The "Main House" on the "Court," a few dozen yards from my own, has a central hall which dates to the 1200s.* My morning commute involves driving down single-lane farm roads between hedgerows taller than my car with no less than 17 blind 90-degree turns. It is rare that I can exceed 25 miles per hour. It is magnificent.

Two days after we moved in, in my first foray to the pub that I would come to think of as "my local" -- the Lower Lode along the River Severn, I got a condensed taste of what life in a small English village means. I walked in the door, ordered a pint, and before I could even turn and look around the place a voice came from behind me. "Ohhhh then, so you're our new American are you? How're you doing? Did the furniture come in alright yesterday?"

At this point I had not actually yet met a single person in the village, and it being a rural village, we live pretty far out on the edge. I mean, sure, my accent obviously gave away my origin, but how the hell did she know that I was now a resident, let alone about my furniture? "Ummm, uhhh, yeah. It came in fine."

"Yeah well, my cousin Sophie's husband's brother was trying to get to the Lode but the truck had jammed up the whole road, so he and the driver had a chat."

Yep, in a single line she pretty much confirmed every movie-induced stereotype I had about the Brits and brilliantly so. I loved that she saw no apparent issue with using the possessive. I was "their" American now. Just as every village must have an idiot, and every pub must have a "character," so too the village must have an "exotic." (Usually defined as somebody from more than 100 miles away.) In my case, sadly, two of the requirements were now met by one person. Still, I love it here.

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Yet my years here have confirmed the reality that we are still very much, "two people separated by a common language." Life in England is nearly like life at home. The language is mostly the same, and the rest I can infer through context. The weather is pretty much like what I grew up with in Northeastern Ohio. The food -- well, let's not talk about the food. But all the rest of it is wondrous. And with all of the history on every step of soil, being assigned here has been, for me, like making a child move to Disney World. And yet there are still those little differences.

It's not that I mind them, but I do notice them. There is, foremost, the British inclination towards understatement. I mean, these are a people who, when their country was being bombed into rubble and thousands of their citizens killed by Nazi bombers, probably referred to it as "a spot of bother." And it takes some time to translate, "Hmmm, that's interesting" from what you hear as an American ("He thinks this is interesting") to what the Brits mean ("That is an absolutely barking mad idea and I can't believe you even brought it up!"). There are other differences as well.

We Americans wear our hearts on our sleeves, we all know that. It is one of the things that makes us spectacular and, at times, maddening. We are, as a nation and a people, splendiferously excessive. This can be embarrassing, but in some ways it works. It extends to the support given to those of us in uniform. I cannot go to my hometown in rural Ohio and successfully buy a beer even if I wanted to. Somebody will always stop me from paying or occasionally pay my tab anonymously. There are a million ways that you, the American public, have shown that the Vietnam split between your soldiers and the people is erased. People may not like the wars that we are sent to, but no longer does anybody mistake the soldiers for being the ones who decided to go to war.

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But when I spend time with British soldiers and officers and learn that sometimes if they are in uniform they may be refused service in a restaurant/pub, I am floored by this. That is extremely rare, but it has happened. I note also that nobody ever says to a soldier, "Thank you for your service," or anything like that. And having served alongside the Brits in Afghanistan I can tell you that the outpouring of public support that our American Soldiers and Marines get downrange completely and totally dwarfs what British soldiers receive from the British public. It gave me a bit of a start, frankly.

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And then they make me understand, they're just being British.

Because we are so far north, latitude matters, and it is dark in the morning when I leave for work, and since the sun sets at around 16:30 right now, it is dark when I come home as well. England, the real England (meaning all places outside of London) pretty much shuts down at 17:00, so at this time of year I am almost never in town when the sun is up, stores are open, and people are on the streets. But just the other day I had some financial stuff that absolutely had to be done, so I delayed going in to work until after the banks open. I parked my car on the High Street ("High Street" is in England what "Main Street" is in the States) and walked down the length of it to my bank. Something twigged.

I get these feelings now and again. It is as though my eyes are seeing something small, but it takes my mind a little while to assemble the evidence my eyes are collecting and come up with a useful observation. Walking up and down High Street to and from the bank the feeling kept washing over me, "I am seeing something, but I don't know what it is." And then it hit me. Along that walk, as I passed maybe 100 people, every single one of them was wearing a poppy -- a cheap paper and plastic replica of a red poppy.

November 11 is different here. It is not a national holiday, not a day off, but it is a day of complete solemnity. The closest Sunday to the 11th is revered as "Remembrance Sunday." In London outside the Ministry of Defense at the Cenotaph commemorating the dead of the First World War, the Queen will lay a wreath made entirely of poppies.

The poppies are a symbol, drawn from the poetry of a Canadian, a doctor named McRae. In 1915 his friend had been killed in a German attack, and McRae conducted the burial. Then he sat down near the freshly turned earth beneath which his friend lay and wrote:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.

He wrote a third verse as well, but it is jingoistic, and I do not like it, so look it up for yourself if you feel the need.

The poppy is provided by the British Legion. This is sort of like the American Legion, the Veterans Administration, and the Wounded Warrior Project, etc., combined. The difference here in Britain is that it is entirely privately funded. Britain does not appear to have quite the same social safety net for their damaged warriors. They certainly didn't back in the wake of WWI, and the British Legion evolved to fill this gap.** So every November, for about 20 days or so, you can go anywhere -- any grocery store, any convenience store, any pub (and, ummm, there are a LOT of pubs in Britain) -- drop a few coins into a box, and pick up a little poppy. Then you pin it to your breast, and wear it until the 11th.

And when you do that, when you put your money where your mouth is not, in your British way you are showing the troops, "Thank you for your service." So what I was seeing, that morning in Tewkesbury, was a direct, visible, economic, and emotional, but completely silent and understated statement from every single Brit that I passed on the street that morning saying, "I support you," to their troops. And that is when I almost cried, because finally, I think, I got them.

I am extremely proud that our American "senior officer," a one-star general here, said, "Yes, I authorize any of you who want to, to wear the poppy of our allies on your uniform for these couple days." And now, in a small corner of England, 36 Americans are wearing the poppy as well.

*We would call this an "estate," but for the Brits, that word means something like what "projects" means for us Americans. Common language…mostly. Don't even ask me about "pants."

**Their National Healthcare Service is, however, comprehensive. All medical care for Britons is provided by the nation.

This article reflects the opinions of the author, and not the DOD, the US Army, or any other organization. I can be reached at R_Bateman_LTC@hotmail.com.